Saturday, February 22, 2014

Watching his alma mater’s men’s basketball team lose 66 of
91 games sends a man to a deep, dark place, where the task of generating
reasons for optimism often involves finding a shovel and digging an even deeper
hole, on the belief that he once struck gold so it has to be there again,
right?

Equal parts delirium and desperation lead said man to
believe he’s struck gold when all he’s really done is hit some more rock. But
that rock sure looked like gold to me Wednesday afternoon, when my digging
revealed some pretty good harbingers for the Dutchmen as they prepared to face
CAA leader Delaware.

(1/2) Meaningless? Interesting? Both? Tonight
will be 7th time since 94-95 Delaware (11-1 in #CAAHoops)
faces #Hofmbb
w/3 or less league Ls.
— Jerry Beach (@defiantlydutch) February
19, 2014

(Yes, the Maine Tweet and the Speedy/Stokes Tweet each
appeared before I corrected my Tweet about Hofstra’s record against 1- or
2-loss conference foes after Valentine’s Day. My sporadically updated blog, my
rules)

Since this is a sporadically updated blog, there’s no use trying
to create suspense: History proved to be a big fat liar as the Dutchmen lost
for the 67th time in their last 92 games in falling to Delaware,
81-77, at Hofstra Arena.

Still, despite the above-mentioned fatalism, and the
tortured path we took getting there—the Dutchmen led by 15 in the first half
and were 0-for-7 when shooting with a chance to take the lead in the final
3:30—it was, like much of this 8-20 season, oddly fun.

“Thought it was a heckuva college basketball game, I really
did,” Joe Mihalich said. “As heartbroken as we are, it was a lot of fun out
there.”

As I thought in November, this season has turned out to be a
volume worth placing on the bookshelf (GOOGLE IT CRAIN) next to the 1993-94
edition. That was another rather bizarre, expectation-free, bridge-the-gap
season in which a bunch of players who were new to us took advantage of what
would likely be their only chance to occupy center stage by playing compelling
basketball, despite a sub-.500 record.

More than 71 percent of the Dutchmen’s minutes and more than
76 percent of their scoring has come from players who are either new to the
program (grad transfers Zeke Upshaw and Dion Nesmith and freshmen Jamall
Robinson and Chris Jenkins) or graduating at the end of the year (Stephen
Nwaukoni).

So next year’s roster—which should feature Niagara transfers
Juan’ya Green and Ameen Tanksley and SMU transfer Brian Bernardi as well as
freshman guard Eliel Gonzalez, who spent this season in the NCAA gulag—will
bear absolutely no resemblance to this year’s.

And if everything goes according to plan for the
Dutchmen—and hey, we know how often THAT happens—then by 2015-16, nobody will
actually believe the 2013-14 season ever happened, except for those of us loyal
enough to witness it.

Just as we do with the 1993-94 team—HEY LITOS THE ECC REALLY
DID EXIST I HAVE A NOTEBOOK PROTECTOR THAT PROVES IT—we’ll probably have a hard
time convincing people that this year happened, and an even tougher task in
explaining why we enjoyed watching it.

The defeat Wednesday marked the fourth time the Dutchmen
have lost a conference game in which they’ve led by at least seven points—and
the second time they’ve blown a double-digit first half lead and lost to likely
no. 1 seed Delaware. In addition, the Dutchmen came back from a 17-point second
half deficit to briefly take the lead against James Madison on Feb. 10.

“I truly believe we can beat anybody in this league,” Mihalich
said. “I just told the guys that in the locker room. I tell them all the time.
And we can. We proved it tonight. There’s just no doubt we can beat anybody in
the league.”

As frustrating as it is to watch the Dutchmen come so close
and fall short so often, it has been a pleasure to watch a team try—to the
point of exhaustion—to overcome its shortcomings with effort and moxie alone.

Last year’s post-disaster squad was endearing in much the
same way, but that season began with higher expectations and a much better
team, so there was a regrettable “what if” thread weaving its way through the
season that isn’t present this time around.

“You always want more out of them,” Mihalich said. “They
have great heart. We’re playing short-handed—we play eight guys, and really,
it’s six guys getting all the minutes—and so the second half rolls around,
maybe we get a little weary out there. We’re a little undermanned.

“And at the same time, we’re in every game.”

As on Wednesday, history appears to be on the side of the
Dutchmen as the CAA Tournament approaches and they try to put a memorable bow
on a season that would otherwise be forgotten—or not even acknowledged at
all—by outsiders.

It was 20 years ago next month, of course, when Hofstra sent
Butch van Breda Kolff into retirement a champion by winning three games in
three days to win the final ECC tournament.

(Congratulations to me, that’s my 10,000th
reference to the 1993-94 ECC tournament on this blog!)

“We’ve got to stop defeating ourselves a little bit,” Upshaw
said. “And I think we’ll get over that hump of being close.”

Of course, examining history for favorable trends usually
happens when you want to ignore the evidence gathered in the present. And the
odds of an undermanned team authoring a historic CAA tournament run by winning
three games in three days—or, more likely having to win four games in four
days—aren’t good. So let’s just enjoy whatever happens over these final couple
weeks without trying to bestow an unreasonable Hollywood ending upon it.

Then again, when (err, if) Hofstra beats preseason favorite
Towson today, the Dutchmen will be 9-20—the same record they posted in 1993-94.
Sometimes, history is just too potent to ignore.